Part 4: The Forgotten Second Hands

No one in the Clockmaker’s Guild knew much about Lyn. She moved like a shadow, appearing in the dead of night as if carried by a cold northern wind. But only Du Hao—who once caught a glimpse of a strange light in her eyes, a glimmer not of this world—understood that Lyn’s past was like a broken timepiece, still trying to tick its way back to a single, fateful moment.

Ten years ago, in the mist-shrouded northern land, there stood an ancient academy called Luc Hao, dedicated to training those who could hear the heartbeat of time. Lyn was the academy’s brightest student. While others struggled to distinguish the ticking of a pendulum clock from a sundial, she could already sense the fractional discrepancies between two timepieces. People whispered that she was “The Daughter of Time.”

But in her final year before the ascension ceremony, disaster struck.

During an experiment on the "Supreme Clock Core"—a forbidden relic untouched for thousands of years—Lyn secretly opened its chamber. She wasn’t seeking power, but a cure for her father, who suffered from a strange illness that made time race unnaturally fast through his body. But the moment she breached the core, there was a faint explosion—one only she could hear. A temporal rift opened and devoured part of her memory.

The academy burned that night, though no one could ever say how. And Lyn vanished.

For the next seven years, she wandered through cities where time had no meaning, working as a street-side clock repairer in exchange for stale bread and a place to sleep. The watches and clocks she touched, no matter how broken, began ticking again—as if someone had coaxed them back to life.

Du Hao eventually found her in a dusty Arab bazaar. She was fixing a pocket watch, her eyes as gentle as they once were—though no longer innocent. From that day, Lyn became a member of the Guild, though no one knew why she had agreed to return.

Lyn never spoke of her father. But sometimes, in the depth of night when the wind whispered against the glass like groaning second hands, she would place her hand over a broken timepiece and whisper, “Time... slow down, just a little.”

What she didn’t know was that the Supreme Clock Core hadn’t forgotten her. And the fracture she once opened—was still breathing in the shadows, second by second...